Posted
by
samzenpuson Monday August 18, 2014 @06:06PM
from the gathering-the-cash dept.

Nerval's Lobster writes Women outpace men when it comes to raising money for technology projects through crowdfunding sites such as Kickstarter, according to a new study by researchers at New York University and the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. Jason Greenberg (NYC) and Ethan Mollick (Wharton/UPenn) chose 1,250 Kickstarter projects in five categories: games and technology, where founders were predominantly male; film, with an even gender distribution; and fashion and children's books, both populated with more female founders and backers. They analyzed additional factors such as "industry typing" (a theory in which people 'often hold conscious or unconscious biases about what gender is the archetype employee in a particular occupation or industry') and restricted the data set by geography and how much money each Kickstarter project wanted (a project aiming for less than $5,000 may attract an inordinate percentage of family and friends as funders, skewing results). After crunching the data, they found that female founders of technology projects were more likely than males to achieve their Kickstarter goals, a finding that didn't extend to the other four categories. "It appears female backers are responsible for helping female founders succeed in specific industry categories that women backers generally disfavor," they theorized, adding a little later: "The value of crowdfunding is that it enables access to a pool of potential female backers particularly inclined to support women in industry categories in which they believe women to be underrepresented."

Am I the only one who looks at this and thinks, "Here's clear evidence that, contrary to popular rhetoric, there is a powerful pro-female bias in this society, and any underrepresentation and underfunding that exists can therefore be entirely attributed to, I won't say failings... attributed to the character, capabilities and choices of women"?

Am I the only one who looks at this and thinks, "Here's clear evidence that, contrary to popular rhetoric, there is a powerful pro-female bias in this society, and any underrepresentation and underfunding that exists can therefore be entirely attributed to, I won't say failings... attributed to the character, capabilities and choices of women"?

Women receive more sympathy from society than men, it's called the gender empathy gap. It also contributes to why the vast majority of homeless are men, lack of battered men's shelters despite spousal abuse being split 50/50 between the sexes, significantly higher suicide rate in men, etc. Anyone who hasn't noticed this is brainwashed by feminism.

One of the side effects happens to be that often all a woman has to do in order to generate a substantial amount of money is cry a little on the internet and peo

Women receive more sympathy from society than men, it's called the gender empathy gap. It also contributes to why the vast majority of homeless are men, lack of battered men's shelters despite spousal abuse being split 50/50 between the sexes, significantly higher suicide rate in men, etc.

Yes this is all true.

Anyone who hasn't noticed this is brainwashed by feminism,

Actually feminism is about equality for men and women. If we become truly equal then that will no longer be a problem (along with a whole bunch

The assumption behind sexist things is that women are somehow lesser. This means that a man with attributes (e.g. what you said) which are seen as "traditionally female" is assumed to be a "lesser man" because he's more like a woman. And people don't like helping a lesser man because why bother, right?

You don't need a hierarchy to explain the difference, stereotypes will do. Men are not expected to need help, so we don't help them.

If it was a hierarchy, we would expect either "manly" women (better women) or "womanly" men (lesser men) to be preferred, which is not what we observe: Both genders are expected to conform to the stereotype, and are punished for not doing so.

baaaaaaaloney. If that was the case then while women were championing the concept of DV shelters, they would have gone ahead and created shelters for men. They did not. While they were chamioning alternatives to prison sentencing for women with extenutating circumstances, they would have done the same for men. They did not. While they were holding their walks and fundraisers for breast cancer, they would have done the same for prostate cancer. They

Okay. So naturally feminists are working hard to set up those shelters for men who suffer from domestic abuse which you confirmed are currently missing?

The thing is, you can claim you are about equality, and even believe so from the bottom of your heart, but if you only ever adress inequalities that go one way, you aren't. You're a lobbyist promoting special interests, perhaps fair-mindledly, but a lobbyist still.

Sexist is discrimination based on gender that causes harm. Sexist is caring about something like this that does not affect you directly.

We should all be neutral about this. It is a fact, it is an observation and there is not necessarily a motive behind it (although for some there might be). Sex sells and the whole world is buying. If women earned more than men there would be no need for child support.

For the large part most feminists are as sexist as those they oppose, and in every walk of life (whether it

So it's ok for men to fund only projects founded by men, the traditional method that's been applied for centuries and is still ongoing?Or are you the type of person that believes all of society can in one day say "we're no longer racist or sexist" and the problem is solved, with no need for any additional action necessary to redress past inequalities? Ie, status quo is fine as long as we apologize.

"Your ancestors treated them like shit" is a good excuse if those ancestors are still alive. If the ancestors paid no compensation then who does? If you just wait it out long enough then the slate is wiped clean even though inequality still exists? Ya, so Native Americans got a raw deal and have to live on infertile dirt patches, but it'd be a violation of someone else's rights if they got some extra scholarships and preferences for college admissions.

No no no! It's a communal/national bias? belief? also held by Google [google.com], the NSF, and other organizations, that there is a value in increasing women's participation in STEM and therefore gives money to projects that preferentially train/enable women in the sciences.

I don't believe Google and the NSF are run by women, and yet they share the bias. Also, at least for NSF, you don't have to submit a photo, so it's not just hot chicks . . .

It could be that women are more cautious and risk-averse and will generally not attempt a project that has only a marginal chance of succeeding.So the greater numbers of participating men make up for their lower success rates per man.

If only you could convice more women to participate, their success rates would drop to be as low as the men's...

If a quality project can't raise money elsewhere from more traditional fund-raising sources, might this indicate a subtle case of pre-selection quality bias instead of an indication of any anything to do with kickstarter campaign odds?

It could simply confirm that woman entrepreneurs often have less access to traditional funding sources because their industry contact lists are shorter in certain industries (which may or may not have anything to do with positive specific gender bias on kickstarter).

This is also consistent with the fact that in industries that tend to have more even female representation, they apparently lost the bias they were measuring...

She basically takes $150,000 and takes a year to produce videos, until people complain with kickstarter about it being a scam, which were largely appropriated gameplay from other people's youtube channels.

While you outline a scam by a woman which is relevant to this article, for comparison, of female started projects, how many are scams and vice versa? I would be willing to bet there are more male scammers out there (proportionally) than females, just as males are more likely to commit crime.

They deliberately push buttons with fallacy ridden, hypocritical content and then label the vitriolic response as proof of their victimhood.

So a woman provocatively asserts 'men are pigs' and then the men respond by BEING pigs... and then she says... "see". Sounds like a slam dunk for her, and everyone who acted like a pig just got played as chumps.

If that's really her game, then you're playing right into it. Only got yourselves to blame.

Well, complaining about behavior while engaging in it is like slapping a 'kick me' sign on your back and then using all the kicks you get as 'proof' of your victim status. Hypocrites that ask for it deserve no sympathy.

And yet sympathy funded her kickstarter to the tune of $150,000. Again, if your point is that she's deliberately inciting the abuse to collect on sympathy, then you also have to concede the abusers are chumps playing into her hand.

Well, complaining about behavior while engaging in it is like slapping a 'kick me' sign on your back

How was she engaging in the behavior she was complaining about? Was she sending rape-death threats? or writing games wherein you cou

Yup. there are a lot of suckers out there. The people paying into her kickstarter are the chumps. I'm not talking about them. I'm talking about the few people in the community who deliberately feed her shit for her reaction (that game being an example). She baits this trollish behavior right to herself like flies to shit. Whether she does this knowingly for exposure or 'proof', or is genuinely offended, I don't know, but I have to believe she has the intellect to know what kind of reaction she'd get. H

Yup. there are a lot of suckers out there. The people paying into her kickstarter are the chumps.

No they're not. Or, in other words you're making up your own definition of "sucker" and "chump" which more or less equate to "people I don't like".

It's not like it's some scam kickstarter where they hope to get some widget and the person responds with the money. No, she's a person known for producing videos on sexism and is now continuing to produce videos on sexism.

Well, complaining about behavior while engaging in it is like slapping a 'kick me' sign on your back and then using all the kicks you get as 'proof' of your victim status.

No, to use your odd analogy, it's more like going online to complain that jerks keep kicking her, then a bunch more jerks join the party to kick her just because she called them jerks for wanting to kick her.

I know you though. You're a regular on feminism threads (as am I!) and you seem to be convinced that women are doing far better than

No, I see tit for tat. She deliberately baits the gaming community with fallacy ridden nonsense, and they respond in kind, giving her exactly what she said existed with a big tongue-in-cheek LOL. The community knew she'd either pretend to take it seriously for the sake of exposure and $$$, granting tons of entertainment value, or really take it seriously, granting even more entertainment value. While those people represent a tiny fraction of the community, she lumped those who gave logical retorts in wit

As I read the article, the researchers couldn't determine the sex of the contributors to the Kickstarter projects. But they did notice that tech projects started by women had more success getting funding. Their laboratory experiment indicated some women are more likely to support other women. So they conclude that the Kickstarter projects have the same causation.

I kind of wonder about that conclusion though. The type of person who would fund a Kickstarter project comes from a much different population than the (I assume) students they used in their lab. That said, it is a reasonable hypothesis. Obama certainly gets virtually all of the black vote, Hillary gets a lot of her support from women.

As I read the article, the researchers couldn't determine the sex of the contributors to the Kickstarter projects. But they did notice that tech projects started by women had more success getting funding. Their laboratory experiment indicated some women are more likely to support other women. So they conclude that the Kickstarter projects have the same causation.

I kind of wonder about that conclusion though. The type of person who would fund a Kickstarter project comes from a much different population than the (I assume) students they used in their lab. That said, it is a reasonable hypothesis. Obama certainly gets virtually all of the black vote, Hillary gets a lot of her support from women.

Yup.They're making wild assumptions about the genders of the backers and trying to drawn conclusions about that. They simply do not have that information and cannot approximate it, especially when they're claiming that gender plays a role in funding.

They're making wild assumptions about the genders of the backers and trying to drawn conclusions about that

No, they have a hypothesis that may one day be tested on the entire population in question, they formed their hypothesis on the basis of laboratory tests, Extrapolation is a perfectly valid method of making a prediction (and quite possibly the only useful method), corporations and political organisations all over the planet spend gazillions on the results of such "focus group" tests.

Of course nature is what it is and "the future" always reserves the right to to ignore our most confident predictions. In o

They're making wild assumptions about the genders of the backers and trying to drawn conclusions about that

No, they have a hypothesis that may one day be tested on the entire population in question, they formed their hypothesis on the basis of laboratory tests, Extrapolation is a perfectly valid method of making a prediction (and quite possibly the only useful method), corporations and political organisations all over the planet spend gazillions on the results of such "focus group" tests.

Of course nature is what it is and "the future" always reserves the right to to ignore our most confident predictions. In other words science is in the business of disproving its best answers by replacing them with better ones, it can never prove anything no matter how high you stack the data. If nobody has bothered with the question before then obviously the answer these people have is currently the best answer anyone has.

I was a teenager in the 70's, the social and behavioural sciences have come along way since Feynman pointed out their fundamental problem [youtube.com], the findings from the "Stanford prison experiments" during the same decade is an important, uncomfortable, and sadly underrated example of an early "law of human behaviour".

Uh, no. You can't extrapolate your lab setting to the real model when you don't have any info on the real model to base your lab setting on.Even if they knew the gender distribution of backers, AND of all visitors who ended up not backing, they still wouldn't be representing the Kickstarter model of people coming upon a Kickstarter of their own volition and deciding to support it or not.

The ONLY way to get this data is for Kickstarter to provide it. The ONLY way to accurately approximate it is to replicat

The problem is that when women do it, it's considered 'empowering.' When men do it, it's considered sexist bigotry.

Having a double standard for members of your own group vs. members of other groups is also natural human behaviour. Neither women nor feminists are any less hypocritical or power-hungry than humans in general. Every movement, no matter it's initial purpose, eventually degenerates into benefiting the people within at the expense of the people without, and at that point should be considered as h

Reading TFA is seems by 'Kickstarter Goal' they mean getting funded.Once you've got funded you have to actually do the thing you said you were going to do with the money.

If people are using gender to determine who they are funding, they are presumably displacing more rational metrics, like "does the project make any sense?", or "Does this person seem competent to do what they claim they can do?'.

Thus in those areas where gender bias is measurable in funding, I would assume the odds of eventual successful delivery to be reduced.

Newsflash, the vast majority of investments and purchases made by individuals are driven by emotion and circumstance, logic is way down the list when it comes to real life decisions, what most claim to be logic is actually rationalisation of emotions. If what TFA claims is true then these people are merely rationalising a high risk investment with a secondary social motive, so even if they lose their money they can be satisfied that some nebulous "social good" came out of it. They are trying to set things u

It could be that women have interesting ideas for products that are useful to other women, but that wouldn't get funding through traditional means. So it might not be that women are funding projects because they are started by women, but that because they are started by women they are projects that are interesting to other women.

Reaching Kickstarter goal is not a good measure by itself. Reaching Kickstarter goal more often could mean that women just put their Kickstarter goals to more modest level than men do. Women tend to ask lower wages than men and it could be that women put their goals on Kickstarter to lower level than men do.

I think it's just that women tend to have more realistic goals and thus a better chance of achieving them. Well, it might not be gender related per-se, just that women tend to do more artistic and creative Kickstarters while technology related projects are more often proposed by males, and technology projects are often much harder to pull off.

Look at the average artistic project. Lots of concept art or examples of what the person plans to make, hopefully with a reasonable plan to deliver. Now look at the av

Maybe females were less likely to attempt kickstarting stupid things like booby apps etc, or their projects are more meaningful to a given audience. Remember, not every kickstarter is a geek toy etc, there are a lot of projects with a more personal/direct aim that may be able to easily solicit funds from a targeted audience.

Then again, some dude managed to kickstart making potato salad for a ton of cash, so it seems there are still plenty of people out there to fund stupid projects too.

If you are a man and your have a women in your team, put her in front, whoever is the actual leader. Or maybe at least let your wife/GF/sister/whatever do the advertizing.I believe it should better if she is hot (but not slutty) as it should work on both men and women.

This is assuming of course that the study is unbiased and that gender really matters (i.e. : causation, not simple correlation).